[Mark Suszko]

I’m guessing Marcin has footage shot in multiple frame rates and somehow the editing system was configured to standardize on one of them and adjust the others to compensate?

[Mark Suszko]

My suggestion would be hard side-lighting, perhaps with a colored gel, to pick up the contours.

While you can’t dye the black pants… you could maybe airbrush-paint or sew stripes on them?

[Mark Suszko]

Just an observation; you don’t *have* to make the composite and the tracking work *at the same time*. People may obsess about perfecting the key first, but really what you want is to nail the tracking solve first, then plug that track data into the composite and tweak the color timings and exposure, etc. to perfect the actual key later.

So I suggest lighting relatively flat, and bright enough to render the markers well, because you can tweak the lighting effects somewhat in the color correction step later. For making the initial motion solve, feel free to blow out levels, etc. whatever it takes, so the markers are easy to track, and don’t worry that the actor looks terrible at this stage. One could also reverse the key and use that to generate a clean green plate before actually compositing the talent.

[Mark Suszko]

“There’s a guy named CMX on the phone – says he’s from 1971 and wants to know what’s happening in this thread?”

[Mark Suszko]

Todd is right as usual. And if you had to do extra re-renders because of new client input or changes, you should charge.

It’s a separate discussion, one we’ve had multiple times, on if you want to charge a lower rate for rendering unattended, compared to your time spent actively creating and supervising something. My personal sense of it is, if the render job takes the equipment out of production for anything else, then it’s not out of line to charge one standard hourly rate. If it’s an overnight unattended render that doesn’t interfere with other work, you could choose to discount that render.

If you feel guilty learning on the client’s time while trying something new, you could pro-rate or discount a few hours off the total and not say anything about it. But the work we all do ultimately is all based on our giving our time to the project. The hours are the expression of the effort to make the product. If the product is gorgeous or “just okay”, the hours are still the hours.

Calculate your hourly and day rates and try to stick to them as much as you can, regardless to extraneous factors.

[Mark Suszko]

You missed a trick… with this fabulous idea… steadicam becomes baby carrier:

https://www.facebook.com/tvsupercinema/videos/2045386235520017/

[Mark Suszko]

I’d want to know if facebook resamples or converts every uploaded video to 800 by 800 automatically, in which case I figure the higher rez input leads to abetter final output from their process. If facebook passes thru the video un-modified, then 800×800 original seems to make more sense.

Still trying to figure out why Youtube always feels it has to re-compress my videos, no matter what codec or frame size I try. Then it give me a snarky message offering tips to improve the next upload. Doesn;t seem to matter what I do though.

[Mark Suszko]

Can you be more specific? use the time index in the clip to identify the exact part you need help understanding

[Mark Suszko]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=031vKBPk5eA

I cut my teeth editing reel-to-reel EIAJ half-inch black and white RTR in junior high and high school.

Started at this current job shooting on Sony M3’s with portable decks, and editing 3/4-inch to one-inch Sony with a Grass 100 switcher and an EECO EMME edit controller… a beautiful machine in appearance as well as performance. The 3/4 source decks gave way to betacam then beta SP, about ten tears behind everybody else… and then came the Grass 200 switcher and a bit later, my best friend in the world, the Pinnacle Alladin. Oh, the fun times spent with that box, I’m not kidding. I made that thing dance, sing and do the dishes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koP0OiVZq68

The betacam Sp decks were slowly replaced by DVCPro, then DVC Pro HD. It’s only in the last handful of years our shop went essentially tapeless with P2 cameras and AJA disk-based recording/playback units.

To the question; I believe strongly that learning linear editing first is the best grounding for learning NLE editing, even if you just do that for one day. Most of the skeuomorphics and interface metaphors of our current editing interfaces come from that world.

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[Mark Suszko]

Time to do some benchmarking tests: throw together a demo with, say three to five screens, the actual material used is unimportant at this stage, as long as it is representative of the kind of stuff the client will be giving you, or that you’re shooting/ have shot for this. Run a stopwatch on the time it takes to import the assets, modify them in whatever way the authoring software requires for assembly, time the actual authoring, including designing the interface, time the render duration. Time the playback testing/ integration, and don’t skimp on the testing? QC phase: accuracy IS speed, going back over and over to fix new bugs or mistakes is not efficient as killing them as you go… Now you have an approximate figure for hours spent that you can extrapolate from, and you can see where the potential bottlenecks will be, maybe even get ideas for working around them.

If your team has had experience authoring interactive DVD or BluRay, that might be similar in terms of time spent.

It all comes down to an hourly rate times hours put in.

You needed to do this at some point anyhow, so don’t bill for the testing/ benchmarking, unless it generates usable assets for the actual project.